Sam Reviews "Riding in Cars with Boys" by Beverly Donofrio

I really should stop going into books blindly.  I had never heard of his movie (or at least never seen it) and had no idea this was an actual memoir.  (Although, it does go to further prove that I subconsciously read similar genre books really close together, been on a memoir/autobiography kick lately).  Anyways, I went into this book expecting fiction, but it was really a memoir of a girls teenage life and how in eventually affected her adulthood, though her adulthood is a back burner subject.  I liked it, I thought it was going to be a juicer story, but it was good, it was real and raw and honest and I appreciate that in books like this.

"Lately I've been thinking of the things I did and feeling like a maniac mother. Lately,  I've been looking at my life like there's something to learn.  ...  i hear Frank Sinatra singing "My Way."  I think,  That's it.  I wasn't a terrible person. I just did it like Frank Sinatra." 

"When I was single, I had a job, I had money, I bought nice clothes,  went on vacations. I did what I pleased. Then when you marry,  you too where the man wants. ... If you want to be happy,  stay single." 

"I wondered if I'd still remember Bobby when I was thirty or forty. I'd be an adult,  but in my memory he'd still be a kid.  ...   wondered if Bobby was the lucky one.  ...  Bobby would never get the chance to spread his wings and learn too fly. I wondered if any of us would." 

"I felt like Hester Prynne must've felt in the next chapter,  the one that never got written, the one where she's in the woods on her way to the rest of her life and finally rips off that ridiculous A and throws it in the camp fire." 

"That was the thing with my mother. I'd bought this beautiful fourteen- year- old with- a- rebuilt- engine emerald- green Volkswagen after four years without a car -  which,  incidentally,  was not only going to take me to college but eventually off welfare - and all my mother had to say was, Better keep it clean?" 

"I've been thinking lately that maybe there's a big design, that the end is already there in the beginning and there's nothing we can do about it,  not in a lifetime. Nothing we can do about the events, but  plenty we can do with them."